The Last Double Sunrise

by Peter Yeldham

  “I only need a few thousand dead, so I can sit at the peace table as a man who has fought,” Mussolini had declared. It had aroused a nation-wide furore.

  Beatrice had never been part of Salvatore’s belief in fascism. She loathed The Leader and his politics. Il Duce’s egocentric ambitions meant he aimed high, but it also meant he could be brought down with a thud. Despite their fractured relationship, she had no wish to see the dictator take his cohorts like Salvatore down with him.

  The girl seemed pretty, young and patiently waiting for Salvatore just like Beatrice herself had once in the first years of their marriage. She kept thinking of the parallels while on her way home. She and Salvatore. They’d had twenty years, the early ones happy, and now she was free of him Beatrice had no wish to see him harmed. She also knew there was no way to prevent trouble either, if the sky should fall in.

  “Your wife?” the girl whose name was Antonia said. “You didn’t tell me you had a wife.”

  “It’s over, so there was no real need to tell you,” he said. “Completely, utterly and irrevocably over.”

  “Over? Can marriages be over in Italy if divorce is not allowed?”

  “This one can. I’m free, she’s free. She’s got someone else.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s beautiful, Sally.”

  He didn’t mind her calling him ‘Sally’. In English it was a girl’s name; Luca and some of his friends laughed about it, but in bed when she got hot and started calling him Sally the sex was like fireworks, the way he and Beatrice had been long ago. He wished to God he hadn’t seen her again, the memories were flooding back too swiftly. That first night when he’d stood for mayor and seen this vision sneaking looks at him. Or their glorious honeymoon on Capri, the hydrofoil from Naples, the chair lift to the peak, the Blue Grotto.

  “How old is she, Sal?”

  “Forty,” he shrugged, “maybe a year or two more.”

  “Amazing.”

  “What is?” He was irritated at this continued probing about Beatrice.

  “She is. Amazing to look so beautiful at her age.”

  “Antonia, can we please change the subject?”

  “Of course. But admit it. She is beautiful, isn’t she?” She smiled up at him, a cheeky irresistible young smile, the look that had first attracted him.

  He sighed and agreed. “Yes, Antonia, she is. She was beautiful when I met her. Later she was different.”

  “How?”

  “She became a beautiful pain in the arse.”

  “You’re unkind,” she said. “I hope if we ever split you don’t say things like that about me.”

  I might if you don’t shut up, he thought, but decided to remain silent.

  The first rays of the sun were rising behind them in the east as the Royal Star sailed through the twin headlands that were like portals to the harbour city. Carlo stood in a privileged position on the forecastle deck, the whole panorama stretched before him. There were glimpses of sandy beaches, trim green parks and small patches of bushland, coloured roofs on the large houses across the sloping hillsides, while water lapped softly against seawalls and jetties. Along the waterfront were occasional boat sheds and in the succession of bays, fleets of yachts and motor cruisers at anchor.

  Carlo was viewing this with the aid of Ted Gallagher’s binoculars from a vantage point at the bow of the ship. His friends, who now included the ship’s captain, had found him some paper and art-board, as well as a few tins of paint from the store room on the orlop deck way below the waterline. These had belonged to a former crew member, a part time artist—left there and forgotten until Archie the Scot had found them. Carlo had used the paper and some of the board for his sketches of the crew but kept a sizeable section for this last day. He’d been up since dawn working so he could get it finished in time. He wished he could capture the whole stunning vista, thinking how Turner or one of the impressionists might portray it, but knowing it was an impossible task for him. Time was one enemy. He lacked some essentials—a stretched canvas and the true colours that such a landscape required. There was also the main reason. He had never attempted a task of this dimension; it was beyond him at present. Maybe when he’d done a year or two at the Villa in Rome, if that ever happened, it might be within his capability. But while admitting his limitations, there was something he felt sure he could accomplish. He could see it in the distance ahead, known as the greatest single arch construction in the world.

  The bridge that spanned Sydney’s harbour had only been in existence for nine years, and it was still the tourist icon of this city. It had taken ten years to build and cost millions of pounds that had to be borrowed from London, because of the world recession. Carlo had read about this and the sensational opening ceremony in one of the magazines Stephen had given him. A massive crowd had turned up to watch the State Premier perform the opening, only to witness him beaten to it by a rebel soldier on horseback. Captain De Groot had ridden past the Premier and slashed the ribbon with a sword, before being hauled off his horse by the police and arrested.

  Carlo gazed at the bridge, trying to imagine that day and the crowd’s reaction. From the magazines he already knew before the bridge’s inception Sydney had been like two cities, north and south. Split by the harbour, the only link had been a large punt that carried people and cars from the main metropolis across the stretch of water to its northern neighbour. Long ago in 1815 a convict architect named Francis Greenway had proposed such a bridge to link the two halves of the city, and been laughed at.

  The sunlight was strengthening. He worked leisurely in the warming day. There was ample time to finish the painting before the tug led them to their anchorage and then the long queue of POW’s would take most of the afternoon to disembark. He stood back to see how the picture was beginning to look; the intricate meccano-like pattern of steel girders was strong and bold. A ferry currently crossing in the sea beneath the bridge looked tiny in comparison. He included it as a colourful addition, illustrating the bridge’s immense size and height. He was using a light grey paint that Archie found him, a stark contrast to the different shades of blue in the sky and sea. He wanted the structure to look harsh; the bridge was an epic achievement built during tough years of dole queues and depression. Stark and strong. Something to be displayed to greet the gaze of anyone entering the space his three mates liked to call the Wireless Room.

  An hour later he stood back to study it for the last time. He felt content. It was what he had striven for—a gift to give the friends who’d made the final half of the voyage such an unexpected pleasure. He hoped they’d see it as a token of the time they’d spent together and look at it as fondly as he’d think of and remember them.

  It was almost like an awakening when he became aware that the slow motion of the vessel had stopped. The tug had completed its task of conveying them to the dockside where armed soldiers, police and a convoy of transport vehicles all anticipated their arrival. The bridge itself now loomed high above him, almost directly overhead. Its image on the artboard complete, he placed the painting carefully aside to finish drying in the shade and await the arrival of Ted Gallagher.

  He was acutely aware how much he was going to miss the camaraderie of this ship. Tomorrow he’d be somewhere else; no doubt another prison camp in this new and foreign country called Australia. Would it be better or worse and how long before he would see Italy again? To be reunited with his mother and sister, and possibly Silvana, whom he found increasingly difficult to forget.

  FOURTEEN

  It was late afternoon before they disembarked and were loaded into the waiting transport. The groups destined for camps in Queensland and Victoria had been trucked to Sydney’s central station, where special trains were waiting. Those remaining in New South Wales, their numbers now considerably reduced, were being taken to a distribution centre at the Show Ground. Carlo was among them, one of the last to leave the ship after an emotional farewell from his mates who accompanied him ashore—in case the marine
guards tried a last reprisal. On the dock he gave Ted a second letter, this one to Silvana. Not knowing her address he was sending it via his mother, hoping she could find out. He had laboured over it late the previous night, deciding it was a faint chance to keep in touch with her, unaware that Beatrice’s French contacts at the Villa had fled back to Paris.

  He and a young redhead of about the same age were in the final group to leave the wharf area. The first part of their journey was through sections of the city, and sitting at the back of the open transport gave them a perfect view. The sight of crowds, trams and city shops, made Carlo homesick for Rome.

  They were taken past rows of well-preserved buildings in an area called Macquarie Street, named after one of the early governors. On one side of this street were the consulting rooms of surgeons and physicians, rather like London’s Harley Street, he was told. Opposite them was the Botanic Gardens, then the Mitchell Library, after that the State Parliament and colonial buildings that had originally been the Mint and the Hyde Park Barracks. These could be traced back to the early colonial days, and were designed by the same convict architect, Francis Greenway who had predicted the bridge a hundred and forty years too soon. Some of Sydney’s finest cathedrals and outstanding buildings were the result of his transportation to Australia. These historic details were relayed to Carlo by the redhead sitting next to him in the truck.

  “Where did you learn all this?” Carlo asked, when they left the city centre behind them.

  “It’s a bit ironic. I spent half my life here in Sydney. Grew up and went to school in the eastern suburbs.”

  They introduced themselves; his name was Gianni Devito, his father had been under-secretary to the Italian Consul in Sydney.

  “I was ten when we came here. Nineteen when we left. My father said we’d better leave in case of a war. Back home in Italy I was conscripted, taken prisoner in Egypt, and here I am, back again.”

  “Truly ironic,” Carlo agreed, thinking parts of it were like his own unintended journey to the southern hemisphere.

  “I didn’t want to leave, I liked Australia,” said Gianni, “but I didn’t reckon on returning like this.”

  After the main section of the city they crossed Oxford Street to Anzac Parade, passing Moore Park and the Sydney Cricket Ground until reaching the Show Ground. It was the site of the annual Easter Show, Gianni said, and to Carlo’s eyes looked large enough to handle the New South Wales quota of a thousand prisoners. But only a fragment of this consignment—he and Gianni heard it included them—would be going to a special new camp near Griffith.

  “That’s in the south of this state,” Gianni was able to explain, “a district called the Riverina.”

  Organisation at the Show Ground was a methodical process. The vehicles that brought them there were lined up for hours, the POWs being identified and disembarked in order of arrival. Some were allotted to the tents pitched in open spaces, others billeted undercover in the large display halls. Carlo and Gianni were both lodged in one of these, given a bedroll and a list of rules in Italian.

  “Irony upon irony,” Gianni said, with a rueful grin. “When I was twelve my parents brought me here to the Easter Show. We came to this actual building. It stank of bull shit, the genuine article, because this is where the prize stud cattle were judged.”

  “And now we’re the prize exhibits,” Carlo replied, “though I wouldn’t mind if they kept us here, nice and close to Sydney.”

  “That’d be the top prize,” Gianni said. “I used to know some great girls in this town.”

  “We couldn’t be that lucky,” agreed Carlo, but he was thinking again of Silvana and what might have been, if the war had not intervened.

  It took the rest of the week to assign the Italian prisoners to various areas around the state. Some went to Cowra, some to Bathurst, and a large group to the north of the state near Moree. The last dispatched were a group of only fifty for the camp at Griffith. Carlo and Gianni were both on this train. It was a night trip, leaving at midnight, with two special carriages allotted to them, and packed with men trying to sleep. Some were stretched out on the floor, using their kitbags as pillows, others, the earliest to board, had taken advantage of full length occupancy on the available seats. Carlo was sprawled on the floor near the door to the compartment, listening to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels that were supposed to be soporific. They apparently worked for Gianni who was already soundly asleep, but not for him; this was a restless night that kept him wondering what kind of welcome lay ahead.

  As the hours ticked by he found himself thinking back to that other wakeful night, the excited hours of believing he was about to take up the coveted Villa Medici scholarship. His twenty-first birthday, June, 1940: it was now over three years since that enticing future had been snatched away. Instead of engaged in doing what he loved, the time had been spent training to be a soldier, and not much of one. Then a prisoner in North Africa, one of those undergoing starvation in the first weeks, after that taken to England where the months had seemed endless, but where he had learnt to speak the language. At least that had been an asset he thought, fondly remembering Herbie. Now it was the end of the line in Australia. Who knew what would happen here? And for how long would he be a prisoner in this new and distant land?

  What was that quote from Hamlet that Herbie had taught him? When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions. Yes, that was it. Trust Shakespeare to sum it up so neatly! Trust old Herb to know it.

  He fell asleep just before daylight, and was woken an hour later by the jolt of the train as it halted, then a barrage of shouted commands from outside on the platform. To the few who knew English—the orders were all too clear: bloody well wake up, shift yer arses, and get moving. Australian voices were the ones bellowing this time. One voice in particular didn’t sound welcoming. Carlo looked out the window, seeing a strongly built man with a broad-brimmed hat, a choleric face beneath it as he roared out these instructions. Since he was shouting in his own language, few of the Italians understood what he was saying. This appeared to infuriate him. That was when Carlo caught a glimpse of his eyes, and registered the man staring back at him through the window, then hammering on the glass as if realising an arrival had made this eye contact, but not yet moved.

  “On your fucking bike,” he bawled, as Carlo dropped below his line of vision to shake Gianni awake, amazed that anyone could sleep through this bedlam. They collected their few belongings and joined a long queue on the platform, waiting for what appeared to be the only toilet. This was causing confusion and delay as well as complaints from the queue of prisoners, with the broad-brimmed hat man growing angrier, shouting at the sleepy line to go and piss on the spare strip of land near the platform. Carlo realised it left many confused, so he called out the same instruction in Italian. As the crowd acknowledged this and streamed off the station to hurriedly empty their bladders, the same man’s gaze picked him out again. He pointed a finger at Carlo, and followed this by pushing his way through the crowd to confront him. “Smart-arse joker, eh? Speaka the fucken Inglese, do you, sport?”

  “Sorry. What did you say?” Carlo asked, trying to decipher words like “joker”, as well as the rest of his obscure and muddled sentence. Gianni whispered an approximate version to assist him.

  “I can speak English, but not the slang,” Carlo did his best to explain.

  “We both speak English,” said Gianni, trying to deflect any antipathy. He knew this kind of Australian, with a red face signalling a high voltage temper. “He was only trying to help.”

  “You shut up, drongo. Talk when you’re fucken told to.”

  “Sorry,” Gianni murmured.

  “You will be, if you don’t shut yer bloody trap.” He stared at them both as if he was being challenged. Everything appeared to annoy him. “So I’ve got two smarties, have I? Two educated dagoes. Just do yer best to remember who’s in charge here, you pair of clever-dicks.” He came close, until he was barely a foot away from the
m. “You do know who’s in charge, I hope?” Carlo could smell the stale beer on his breath, and tried not to recoil from it.

  “You are, obviously,” was his only possible answer, since the man’s gaze was now firmly focused on him and demanding a reply.

  “Obvious, is it? Make sure it stays obvious. I don’t like clever buggers. I don’t like blokes who were the enemy until they got shit scared and flew the white flag. Now you dagoes expect us to feed you.” He gestured with a thumb. “Go and piss like the rest of your mob, then line up outside the station.”

  “What a bastard,” Gianni murmured softly, this time in Italian as they moved away from him. Anything said in English seemed to infuriate him. Carlo felt it did not bode well, if this was a sample of what they’d encounter in Australia.

  After relieving themselves they joined the line waiting to board the transport. There were only three utility trucks, which meant a crush in the back of each one, as space was taken up by the charcoal burners, installed because of the petrol rationing. Their destination was apparently a new POW camp in the district, Carlo learned from one of the waiting truck drivers. The main camp was at Hay, established an the outbreak of war to intern resident Germans, but after Mussolini declared war most Italians who lived in Australia were also confined there. The driver said there was a lot of sympathy for the Italians.